After a good nights sleep in our tents beside Orog Lake we had an earlier breakfast at 06:30 overlooking the lake with its breeding colony of Spoonbill and Grey Heron and to the sound of booming Bittern and singing Asian Short-toed Lark. After loading the car we headed up the valley behind the campsite and […]
Tag: Bar-tailed Godwit
Pallid Harrier at New Holkham
The weather forecast was predicting rain for most of the day but with yesterdays reports of Pallid Harrier in New Holkham I was compelled to take the old fella up the A11 in search of his first Pallid Harrier and the bird he had made his main target for 2017. We arrived at first light […]
Curlews in crisis?
To the layman, the curlews are a shy, unassuming family of birds. Their mottled-brown plumage makes for effective camouflage against their marshland and mudflat feeding grounds, meaning they can go about their business unnoticed, prying out invertebrates such as ragworms with their purpose-built curved bills. But if, like the curlews, you take time to dig […]
Alaska – 8th June (Day 12)
Today was a key day in the Nome section of the trip with one of the star birds to see. We were up early and headed up the Kougarok Road to Mile Post 72 we arrived at around 06:00. This site is known as the Coffee Dome, the summit of this relatively small hill is […]
Alaska – 29th May (Day 2 – Part 2)
The hotel on St. Paul, the rather gloriously named King Eider Hotel, is connected to the airport buildings and is rather 1980’s in décor but functional. After checking in we were keen to head into the field and spent a couple of hours birding Ridge Wall, east facing cliffs in the south-west of the island. […]
Bar Tailed Godwit: New Zealand’s Bird of the Year
The bar-tailed godwit (kuaka) has been crowned New Zealand’s Bird of the Year after three weeks of close competition, heated campaigning and attempts at cheating. The Bird of the Year competition is run each year by Forest & Bird, the New Zealand BirdLife partner. The godwits spur public imagination having the longest migratory flight of […]
Plenty of waders – Dhahran Expro Wader Roost
A trip to the Dhahran Expro Wader Roost produced plenty of waders of a good variety of species. The tide was not ideal but plenty of birds were along the edges including both Lesser and Greater Sand Plovers in small numbers. Curlew Sandpipers, Eurasian Curlew, Whimbrel, Bar-tailed Godwits and Dunlins had the largest number of […]
Wading birds declining in the UK (Photos)
The magical wildlife spectacle of hundreds of thousands of wading birds converging on British estuaries could be under threat as research shows big declines in some of the most familiar species. Results from the Wetland Bird Survey reveals that ringed plovers, oystercatchers, redshank and dunlin are among the eight most abundant species overwintering on UK […]